The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Today we begin with Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter. As I reflect on what she’s articulating in her key concept of “thing-power” few things seem to better capture this strange and inarticulate power better than Disney’s Fantasia:

Early in Vibrant Matter Bennett writes, “…objects appear as things, that is, as vivid entities not entirely reducible too the contexts in which (human) subjects set them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotics” (5). Earlier she remarks that she “…will try, impossibly, to name the moment of independenncce (from subjectivity) posssessed by thhings, a moment that must be there, since things do in fact affect other bodies, enhancing or weakening their power” (3).

The mischevious Mickey steals the sorcerer’s hat and enchants the broom, commanding it to do his work of cleaning. Confident that his work is being done for him, he falls off into sleep and dreams of absolute mastery over the forces of nature, controlling even the very stars themselves. Yet when he awakes he discovers that the broom has maniacally been bringing water into the sorcerer’s laboratory, flooding the place. He attempts to destroy the broom, only to have it’s splinters turn into brooms bennt on bringing water into the lab. Dancing brooms, floods, and buckets of water are the stuff of thing power. Thing-power consists of things unleashed on the world, acting in ways irreducible to human intentions and meanings, behaving as if they had their own will. This, I believe, is one of the key themes OOO is striving to articulate.

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4 Responses to “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”

I’m all for coming to terms with independent material activity, just can’t accept those who want to see/personify all objects as literal actors in the sense that they inter-acted with Mickey Mouse. Contrary to recent media trends all things are not shining, not interested in us or any other things for that matter, certainly not staged.

I have the same reservations. My take is that for Bennett this is just “a manner of speaking”. I think basically she wants to argue that things are energetic and animated by all sorts of activities that belies our tendency to characterize them as “passive matters” upon which we impose our forms. For example, she points out all the chemical and microbial processes going on in garbage dumps. None of this, I think, violates the basic things science has taught us about the nature of the world. We need forms of language that allow us to allude to these things even if that language is not quite accurate. The situation in biology is analogous. We talk about organisms “adapting” and about adaptations as being for the sake of solving some particular environmental problem: “hawks have keen eyesight so they can capture their prey.” Clearly, from a precise evolutionary point of view, hawks did not develop keen eyesight for the purpose of catching their prey. Rather, it’s because hawks developed random mutations that allowed them to see well that they were able to exploit certain features of their environment. The point is similar when Bennett talks about “vital matter” (or, at least, that’s as far as I’m willing to go with her).

Levi, I came to the book via Eileen Joy who I admire/enjoy so I really wanted to like it but I think that she (Bennett) wants it both ways,
and so here I prefer Haraway who seems clearer (not so conflicted) that her metaphors are manufactured perspicuous presentations, are performative as opposed to representational. I really wish we didn’t fall into the pbs docudrama rhetoric when we talk about such matters as this lends itself to a reduction to the all too familiar/habitual gossip-world, for me there is both more wonder and more of a shock of the gestalt switch (as geological time hit Darwin) in a presentation of a plant producing wasp pheromones with no such humanish sense/desire of either their genealogical history and or current interactions with wasps. For me going from such alien encounters to say thinking about matters like addiction is truly un-canny so why not develop a rhetoric that delivers that sense of depersonalization, instead of a magpie treasure hunt?

Well, if Ian Bogost ever gets around to finishing Alien Phenomenology I suspect we may get a feeling of the uncanny you are trying to invoke, but I’m starting to wonder what is taking so long as I’ve heard nothing on it’s progress.